Art For the art portion I tried to focus on the perspective of a Muslim women. I chose to use only pencil and I wanted to create the image of a women in a hijab being controlled by a hand above her like a puppet. The hand is supposed to represent a source of power. During my research I decided that I wanted the figure above to be kind of ambiguous because there are so many different sources of power in an Afghan woman's life. The hand could represent a father, husband, son, the prison system and the Afghan government. It's truly up to the viewer looking at the drawing.
Global Studies
To begin, I started with research mainly about Afghan oppression towards women. I knew that Afghanistan struggled with violence targeted towards women, but I wanted to gather some more context. Like how was life like as an Afghan person while the Taliban was in power? How did that change after the Talibans fall? How was life in Afghanistan as a suspected gay person? After figuring out the questions that I really wanted to ask myself, I created a document and worked on answering those questions for my research. When I felt that I had more knowledge on my topic, I decided I wanted to write a series of journal entries attempting to show perspective through different people experiences in Afghanistan. I really wanted to focus on capturing the emotions of different people living in Afghanistan. Although the people I wrote about aren't real, their experiences match that of many others. So to begin, I planned out the characters. The first person I focused on was an Afghan woman. Her name was never given to the reader because I wanted to try and show that Afghan women are often stripped of their identity. This woman talks about carrying her fathers children and living in constant fear. For the second journal entry I wanted to try using a completely opposite perspective, an outsider. I decided to choose an American Journalist to be the point of view. This woman is traveling through Afghanistan and exploring the serious issues going on. Her first stop is a hidden Afghan shelter mainly housing women and their children. She spends time with the women and attempts to capture the pain that they endure. For the third and final Journal entry, I chose an Afghan father. He talks about beating his wife and selling his children for money. Despite this information, he doesn't see anything wrong with his actions. This is normal to him. The point was to show that the father was raised like this and truly doesn't understand the pain that his actions cause. Abuse towards women in Afghanistan is constantly being normalized and forgotten.
English
For English I decided to read and analyze the book Born Under a Million Shadows. I started out by reading the book and taking notes as I went along. I tried to include details about each character. Inside of a google document I wrote down any important details that I felt really impacted the story line. After reading several chapters I reviewed and edited my notes and then started highlighting parts of my notes that showed perspective. After finding and explaining the perspective in the notes, I wrote a blurb at the bottom of the document more throughly explaining perspective in my notes.